by Riley Knight
“What is it?” Scott asked when Mary Anne had bounced off, money carefully clenched in one sandy little fist. No one could accuse Scott of being a stupid man, and he’d obviously picked up Mark’s intent.
Not that Mark had done a lot to hide it.
“You couldn’t have asked more romantically?” Mark asked, feeling more plaintive than angry. “You had to trap me into it with my daughter right there? So that I had no choice in the matter?”
Scott recoiled like Mark had slapped him, hurt showing briefly in his eyes before he covered it with a smirk.
“I mean, it’s just for convenience, right?” Scott said, each word like a knife that twisted just a little bit deeper into Mark’s aching heart. “I didn’t know you wanted some big romantic deal. I can’t read your mind.”
There was just enough truth to the words that Scott was flinging at him that Mark felt the sting even more keenly. Of course, Scott hadn’t had any idea what this meant to Mark. He didn’t know that Mark would have liked this to be real enough that Scott would bother to make a big deal about it.
But it wasn’t, and Scott hadn’t. So Mark just got very quiet, and Mary Anne came back soon enough, laden down with hotdogs and lemonade for them all. She carried it all with a careful studiousness, and Mark couldn’t help but smile when he saw her put it all down, obviously very proud of herself for not spilling or dropping anything.
Dinner would have been very quiet, if not for Mary Anne. She chattered away, livelier than he’d seen her in months, filling Mark with a quiet joy as he watched her. She was a serious child, more often than not, and it was fun to see her grin and tease the two of them.
Mark would have married Scott, probably, even without Mary Anne being a factor. He would have married him for nothing more than that he was falling for him, that he was fascinated by him. He didn’t fall often, but when he did, he fell hard.
That wasn’t what was going on here, of course. Mark was going to have to keep his heart firmly behind a wall. Scott had said it himself. This was about business. This was about them both getting something that they wanted, and as long as Mark kept that in mind, he should be fine.
He was doing this for Mary Anne. To have a co-parent that she liked, and that liked her. He was doing this to bring laughter back to his daughter on a regular basis. He was doing this to get the chance to help raise another child, which he’d honestly been wanting to do for a few years now.
He wasn’t doing this because he was in love. He wasn’t, because if he was, he knew deep down, in a way that was more instinct than conscious thought, that he would scare Scott so bad that the man would probably never stop running
In short, he wasn’t doing this for Scott, and he wasn’t even fully doing it for himself.
Oh, but he wanted to be. Deep down, in that same place that knew that Scott was scared, Mark also knew that he wanted so badly to let himself fall in love with the impossible, infuriating, sexy, gorgeous man that drew him like no one else ever had.
Control. It was all about control. He’d had to learn that after the breakdown of his first marriage. He would exert that control now.
Somehow.
Chapter Nine
Scott
Somehow, Scott found himself engaged.
It would be easy to blame Mary Anne for it. After all, it had made her so happy. Scott couldn’t, not even to himself, try to pass that off on her. Yes, she had been thrilled, and yes, she clearly needed her father to be with someone. He was fairly certain that he’d never met anyone who needed two parents in her life more than she did.
There was one very simple reason, though, that Scott had proposed, as awkward and haphazard as it must have seemed to Mark. That reason was that Scott wanted to. Deep inside his heart, in a place that he hadn’t even acknowledged before now, he’d wanted to do this. The marriage thing, the kid thing, but he’d never met the right woman to do it with.
Maybe there was a very good reason for that. As Scott had sat on the beach, too nervous to look directly at Mark, he’d realized that what he’d really been waiting for wasn’t a woman at all.
It was Mark.
It was too bad that Mark didn’t seem to share that viewpoint.
Very soon after dinner on the beach, Scott had felt like it was time to go. Mark wouldn’t even look at him, much less speak to him, and it was just getting awkward. So Scott had made his excuses, and he’d left. Mary Anne had seemed sad to see him go. Mark had seemed completely neutral about it.
Somehow, Scott had the idea that Mark wasn’t as neutral as he seemed. But the man was too good of a father to show anything else around his daughter, who, for whatever reason, really seemed to like Scott.
No, if Scott had to guess, his guess would be that Mark was furious with him. Scott had been so sure that Mark was interested in the whole marriage thing, if only because it just made sense, but now it seemed like the guy hated him.
Married to a man. A man who seemed to hate him. Yeah, that was a great idea of his. He’d really hit the jackpot in terms of utterly terrible ideas, hadn’t he?
Mary Anne had made Scott promise to come back the next day. It was tempting to just not show up. Maybe even to never lay eyes on Mark again, not when Scott had clearly messed things up so badly. But how could he do that to the poor, innocent little girl? None of this mess was her fault.
So he went, and he saw that Mark was waiting for him outside. Scott had texted to let him know that he was coming, and the look on Mark’s face, solemn and uncompromising, made him think that this conversation wasn’t going to go very well.
Might as well bite the bullet.
“Say it,” Scott demanded, keeping his voice quiet so that only Mark could hear him. “Say that you’re calling it off. Say that it’s over.”
It would be bad enough if things ended now before Scott made a complete idiot of himself and let himself really care for Mark. For the first time, that four letter L word occurred to him, and it didn’t scare him as much as he would have expected. It would be much worse if he let himself feel what he wanted to feel.
Better to end it quickly. To rip it off, like a band-aid. End it so that no one got more hurt than they were already going to be.
“I can’t,” Mark said, his voice nearly a snarl. Yes, Scott had been right. Mark was pissed right the hell off, and he’d only been controlling himself the day before because of Mary Anne. “You made sure of that. You trapped me into this really well, didn’t you? It’s too late to end things because Mary Anne would hate me forever. She doesn’t know that you don’t love me.”
Scott winced and then forced his shoulders to straighten. This was painful, yes, but he wasn’t going to cower.
“I thought it was what you wanted. I thought you were hinting that you’d like to … I’m sorry that I was wrong, that you didn’t want to marry me.” Scott took a deep, deep breath, trying to calm himself down. “Look, it’s fine. I’ll be the bad guy. I’ll end it. You can tell Mary Anne it was my fault.”
Mark’s eyes widened, and something else broke through the stormy depths of those strange, light gray eyes. Panic, it almost looked like. Though surely Scott was mistaken about that. Mark had nothing to panic about. In fact, he was getting out of a situation that he didn’t seem to want to be in.
“What?” Mark asked, and there was an edge to his voice.
“Look, I don’t want to marry someone who hates me,” Scott said quietly, his eyes burning, but dry. He wasn’t going to cry over this. This was just ending a thing that never should have happened in the first place.
But then why did it hurt so much?
“Look … Scott. I don’t want to end it. I did want you to ask me. Just not like that. Not while I was trapped.” Mark sighed and walked over, his shoulders slumped, to sit on a swing on the front porch. “Okay, so let’s talk for a second. No bullshit.”
Scott nodded and followed him over, leaning against the railing. At least Mark wasn’t yelling, and he wasn’t even glaring at him anymo
re.
“Okay,” Scott agreed. “No bullshit.”
“I think we need each other,” Mark said quietly. “All of us. You want a family. Well, so do I, and so does Mary Anne. Can’t we just go off of that? Build something that works for us from that starting place? Maybe it’s not the most traditional way to go about it, but couldn’t it work for us?”
Scott looked at Mark, searching his face. The anger had passed, it seemed, and Mark honestly didn’t seem to want for this to be over. When Scott looked into his own heart, when he searched it, no bullshit, just like Mark had said, he didn’t want it to end, either.
It was pretty clear to Scott that this thing between them was coming to mean far more to him than it was to Mark, but that was okay, maybe. As long as Scott kept it in mind, and didn’t let his heart get broken. Which might be difficult, since he didn’t have a lot of practice in caring enough that anyone could break his heart, but he thought it was probably worth it.
“You’re right,” Scott admitted, sighing softly. Part of him wished that Mark wanted to get married for the traditional reasons, but he’d take what he could get. “Yeah. You’re right. We need each other, and Mary Anne needs us both.”
Mark nodded, and his face suddenly relaxed. All of a sudden, he was no longer as terrifying to Scott as he had been just a few seconds before, and when Mark patted the seat of the swing beside him, Scott went and sat with only minor wariness.
“So then … we’re really getting married?” Scott asked, and Mark smiled and nodded.
“Looks like it,” he said, his voice downright mild now. That was quite the relief. Scott had read Mark’s comics and knew that they were grittier and more intense than most of the things on the market, but he hadn’t known until the last twenty-four hours just how intense Mark himself could be.
In Scott’s world, people didn’t really do intense. Not really. Oh, the actors would know how to fake it well enough, and they were certainly passionate, most of them, about their jobs, but that wasn’t quite the same as what Mark did.
There was nothing trivial about the guy. That’s what it came down to. He was quiet, but he didn’t hide what he was feeling. Not unless he had to to protect his daughter.
All of these things, and more, were what was screwing Scott over. He was marrying someone, and it was supposed to be nothing more than a marriage of convenience, but it was becoming so much more than that to Scott.
It figured that the first time he fell for someone, it would be in a situation like this. That was pretty much the definition of irony. That he could find himself starting to believe in the idea of love with someone that would never love him. That saw him as a means to an end.
“Okay,” Mark said, and then he grinned. “Let’s plan ourselves a wedding.”
Scott looked at Mark and then suddenly grabbed the other man’s hand. Maybe it wouldn’t be welcome, but he couldn’t know until he tried, right?
“Look, this is your last chance. I’ll let you off the hook if you want. I can go in there, talk to Mary Anne, and we can both just walk away from this. If you want to dodge the bullet, then this is your chance to do it.”
Because if Mark didn’t walk away now, the truth was, Scott wasn’t sure that he was going to be able to let him leave. Ever. And maybe that was dangerous, given that this was supposed to be just business. It was only fair to give Mark one more chance to back out because it really was going to be the last.
“I’m sure,” Mark said quietly, and he slipped his fingers between Scott’s in an intimate handclasp. It was strange how it felt like Mark’s fingers belonged there, their palms pressed together.
“So this marriage, it’s not real, right? But are we going to do the sex thing?” Scott asked, a little bit ashamed of himself for thinking about it. It seemed important, though, that they both know what was going on.
If they weren’t going to sleep together, then Scott was going to have to get in the habit of taking quite a few cold showers, and he could foresee that already. Scott had never been comfortable with his attraction to men, but Mark made it impossible for him to ignore.
“I don’t know,” Mark said, still holding Scott’s hand. “Do you want to?”
Scott hesitated. Even with everything that they’d done together, it was still hard for him to admit to that sort of thing. But after a long struggle with himself, he nodded slowly.
Mark had said ‘no bullshit.’ If they were going to make this work, that was probably a good guideline to follow. There were some things that Scott wasn’t going to embarrass them both by saying, of course, but this, he could admit to.
“Yes,” he said, looking at Mark, right in those mysterious eyes of his. “I want to. If you do.”
Mark didn’t answer. Not directly, anyway. Instead, he just smiled and leaned in. His lips met Scott’s, and that same rush of heat slid smoothly through his body, making his skin exquisitely sensitized, making him very aware of his own flesh, of how easily Mark could arouse him.
It wasn’t even fair, and it was getting more and more difficult to tell himself that he was a straight man when he was falling into some pretty serious lust, and maybe even more, more and more every second.
The kiss was irresistible, but when it ended, Scott knew that was as far as they could go where they were. Mary Anne was inside, and she could come out at any second. This was stolen time, and they both knew it.
Which didn’t mean that Scott was happy about it.
“To be continued?” he asked hopefully, and he wasn’t even sure how Mark managed to get to him like this. What was so special about him that he had captivated Scott so thoroughly?
“Oh hell yeah,” Mark replied, grinning, and hand in hand, the two of them went back into the house to find Mary Anne. After all, there was a wedding to plan, and Scott knew that she would want to help. What nine-year-old girl wouldn’t?
Chapter Ten
Mark
How much was Mark going to regret doing this? For how many years? It was bound to explode in his face at some point, that seemed pretty inevitable, so then, why was he doing it?
With his history, he should know better. One horribly failed marriage was enough for most people. He was probably an idiot for going into this … and even more of an idiot for being excited about it.
Nervous, yes, he was definitely that, but he was also legitimately excited to be doing this. He wanted it, and that was the main reason that he was doing it. He knew that Scott was doing it for Mary Anne, and for the child that they would be adopting, and he could accept that, but for him, it was something different.
So here he was, all fancied up in a suit (when had the last time been that he’d worn a suit? His last wedding, he thought. Almost ten years ago.) and waiting inside his house.
A few people were waiting in the backyard, where they’d decided to have the ceremony. Not many, but some close friends of his, a few of Scott’s, and some of Mary Anne’s friends. Mary Anne had insisted on that, because this was her one and only chance to be a flower girl, and she wanted them to see it.
It wasn’t perfect. There wasn’t much in the way of family there. Mark had never known his father, who had walked out when he was just a kid, and he wasn’t really on great terms with his mother. It was just his younger brother Nathan that was there. Scott hadn’t been brave enough to ask his parents to come, claiming that he already knew that they wouldn’t, and that they wouldn’t approve, and that they might, in fact, do their best to ruin it.
Still, Mary Anne was there, squirming with eagerness, ready for the sign that she was supposed to walk out, sprinkling flower petals along the way. And Mark was there, and Scott was there, and really, if the three of them were there, that was good enough for Mark.
Was he really doing this? Mark stared at the floor, trying to see past his own fear. It had seemed so easy, to just marry Scott to make having a family simpler. Now here he was, facing that decision, and not so sure that he’d made the right one.
If only Scott loved
him … and it was then that Mark realized that he loved the man. He’d suspected that he was falling for him. Now he knew, and it was so much worse than he could have thought.
He wasn’t just falling. He’d fallen. Fallen into Scott, fallen into love, like he’d jumped off of a cliff and was plummeting down toward God knew what. Maybe it would be water, maybe concrete. Maybe it would be a disaster, maybe it would be the best thing he’d ever done in his life.
No way to know but to do it.
“Are you ready?” Scott asked, and Mark glanced up and found that he couldn’t breathe for a second. No matter what Scott wore, he was gorgeous. Dressed as he was in the beautiful suit, looking elegant and sophisticated, Mark started to wonder why Scott, as handsome as he was, would even want anything to do with Mark at all.
Everything about him was flawless. Not a dark hair out of place on his head, and with the rich, deep, vibrant burgundy-red of his tie matching his coloring perfectly, the guy could almost have been a model. He was perfect.
Meeting his eyes, though, the strangest thing happened. All of a sudden, all of the nerves that had been churning in him, riling up his stomach and making his heart pound fast, they were all gone. Stilled. Silenced. Just like that, Mark felt calm. Or as close to it as he was going to get, anyway.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m ready,” Mark said, and he meant it. Whatever was going to happen between them, this was going to be a hell of an adventure, and maybe that was enough to start with.
“Okay, Mary Anne,” Scott nodded to the girl, who grinned and hugged them both, heedless of her incredibly fluffy while flower girl dress, which she’d picked out herself. She couldn’t have picked one with more ruffles. It was physically impossible.
Still, she looked adorable in it, and Mark smiled and hugged his daughter back. This was going to be good for her, and really, that was enough for him to try to make it work.
“I’m glad you’re doing this,” she said. And then she was off, blithely scattering flower petals as she did her best to walk with all due solemnity down the ‘aisle,’ which was really just a space between the two small banks of chairs that had been set up for the few guests.